The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

I'm looking at getting a Lexar Echo ZX to replace my aging tiny USB drive.

I love that it looks so inconspicuous:



You guys have any other recommendations?

Got myself a Pico C besides my 2.5" drive. It's fast, reasonably priced, capless and water resistant.

I've been searching for a while for the smallest possible USB device I can that hooks into a micro-SD card. There's one that Kingston makes that looks adequate, but flimsy.

Biggest thing is size without sacrificing durability. Form factor cannot be much larger than the USB port itself. I bought one that's slightly larger at a great discount that I hate because it won't next to other devices in the ports on my machine.

dany wrote:Got myself a Pico C besides my 2.5" drive. It's fast, reasonably priced, capless and water resistant.

Another vote here for the Pico C, great drive, light, small, fast (32/13 R/W), pretty much indestructible. Although I just bought a 16GB Super Talent Express Duo to upgrade to.

Some good discussion so far!

@webfork - I haven't considered microSD > USB adapters yet.

@dany, @hydaral - Pico C looks interesting.

I haven't even considered read/write speeds yet. Simply aesthetics, but I should probably look into performance!

freakazoid wrote:I haven't even considered read/write speeds yet.

If your pc supports USB 3, then speeds will be lighting-fast. But even with USB 2 it's still much faster than my old sandisk. What sold me however was it's waterproof steel casing. I live in a rainy country and do everything by bike. This drive doesn't seem to be bothered by harsh conditions, it just always works.

From what I have read, the strange thing is that the USB 3.0 chips and firmware on the flash drives are cheaper and faster than the USB 2.0 ones, even when used with USB 2.0. So if you can, get a USB 3.0 drive, it should be cheaper and faster than an equivalent USB 2.0 version.

freakazoid wrote:@webfork - I haven't considered microSD > USB adapters yet

Glad that struck you as interesting. It just seems to me that most USB drives I have now are old ones that I never use anymore. Ideally, buying a card reader means you have one device that you swap out with increasingly large, increasingly fast flash media.

USB 3.0 drives vary quite a bit. As much as USB 2.0 drives do. Some USB 3 drives are slower than USB 2 ones, counter-intuitively. We learned quite a lot about it while putting together the PortableApps.com Companion drive. We've also found that USB 3.0 chipsets in computers vary wildly in speed and quality. To the point that one laptop's USB 3 chipset performed slower with USB3 drives than my desktop did with only USB 2 available to the same drive. Meanwhile, the same drive worked at USB3 speeds on a machine with a better USB 3 chipset in it. We also found a lot of variations in the speed of using a drive with portable software where small random writes are critical. Those speeds don't necessarily correlate with advertised read/write speeds (which are maximum sequential best-case numbers and often only theoretical) or price. The bottom line is that you really need to know what you're getting into.

I personally use these: http://getusb.info/wp-content/uploads/2 ... 11307d.jpg (I have only tested them with micro SD up to 16GB).

I got 2 or 3 of them lying around since they proved invaluable in many situations... Plenty available on the net for just cents.

Happy holidays everyone

Heh, that's a smart solution. I always lose the caps

I am looking for good, high speed portable USB drive but can't find any good one yet. Main problem is with the speed. Any suggestion?

DustinDeTorres wrote:I am looking for good, high speed portable USB drive but can't find any good one yet. Main problem is with the speed. Any suggestion?

My post in a similar forum last week sorta covered this: go with a portable SSD:
viewtopic.php?p=86192#p86192

webfork wrote:

DustinDeTorres wrote:I am looking for good, high speed portable USB drive but can't find any good one yet. Main problem is with the speed. Any suggestion?

My post in a similar forum last week sorta covered this: go with a portable SSD:
viewtopic.php?p=86192#p86192

Thanks for sharing.

DustinDeTorres wrote:I am looking for good, high speed portable USB drive but can't find any good one yet. Main problem is with the speed. Any suggestion?

I suggest Lexar JumpDrive P20. It's exceptionally fast for a thumb drive: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/L ... Need-Speed